Beeping your car horn to the tune of “Shave and a haircut, two bits” in Mexico is considered a way of flipping off another driver, translating rhythmically as the relatively vulgar phrase, “chinga tu madre, cabrón.”
The top college pole vaulting school in the U.S. currently is the University of South Dakota Coyotes (that’s the “Yotes” for short).
It’ll cost you about $50 a day to rent a 4×4 vehicle in Botswana or Namibia.
It wasn’t until 1399, with the ascension of Henry IV, that England had a ruler whose mother tongue was English.
Two decades before Thomas Edison invented his sound recording method, Edouard-Léon Scott de Martinville captured sounds using his invention, the phonautograph, which he patented in 1857. Scott used a drum to capture sounds on soot-blackened paper wrapped around a hand-cranked cylinder, but couldn’t come up with a way to play them back. In 2008, a team of researchers did just that, and Scott’s recordings were finally heard for the first time.
This article appears in July 7 • 2017.